John Muir

John Muir lived from 21 April 1838 to 24 December 1914. Of Scottish
origin he was a noted US naturalist, explorer, writer, and geologist: and he
was an environmentalist decades before anyone would really have recognised the
description. The wider picture in Scotland at the time is set out in our
Historical Timeline.

At the age of 11 in 1849, Muir moved with his family to a farm in
Wisconsin. His education progressed as far the University of Wisconsin, but he
never graduated. Instead he spent 1866 working as an industrial engineer in
Indianapolis, before setting off to walk the thousand miles from Indiana to
Florida simply looking at the world around him. A bout of malaria prevented the
planned onward trek through South America, so he went to California instead.

In early 1868, Muir travelled for the first time to Yosemite. After
his first view of Yosemite Valley he wrote, "No temple
made with hands can compare with Yosemite.... it is the grandest of all special
temples of Nature." Muir was so entranced with the area he took a series
of locally based jobs to allow him to roam and study the valley and the Sierra
Nevada.

A prolific writer, Muir made an early mark with his (at the time
radical and controversial) theories about glacial formation of the Yosemite
area. He then went on to publish a series of studies about the Giant Sequoia
trees found in the Yosemite Valley.

From 1889 Muir was at the forefront of moves to have the Yosemite
Valley declared a National Park: and the following year he achieved a partial
success when the area was placed in state control. In May 1892 he founded the
environmental lobby group, the Sierra Club, and served as its president until
his death in 1914.

In 1903 Muir accompanied President Theodore Roosevelt on a visit to
Yosemite. On the journey there Muir was able to convince the president that the
park should be protected by the Federal Government rather than by State
Government. But having won his battles over Yosemite, Muir was unable to
prevent the government approving a dam project in another nearby valley. He
felt he had lost his last great battle, and died a year later, on Christmas Eve
1914.

Muir is remembered both in his native Scotland and in the USA. As
well as his birthplace, a country park west of
Dunbar is named after him, and the
John Muir Trust work for the preservation of Scotland's wild places. In the
States, his memory continues in the name of the John Muir Trail, the John Muir
Wilderness, the Muir Woods National Monument, and in John Muir College, a
residential college of the University of California. And in 2005 his image
appeared, along with the California Condor and Half Dome Mountain, on the
California state quarter dollar.